Keating Sells Out for Quantum Hype

Great progress in quantum computers was announced a couple of weeks ago, and I posted comments by Scott Aaronson and Sabine Hossenfelder. Now another popular physicist channel has weighed in, attacking her:

Quantum Computers Are Useful. You're Using Them Wrong.

Dr Brian Keating
338K subscribers

Sabine Hossenfelder says quantum computers are only useful for breaking codes. She's wrong — and my undergraduates are building the proof. What's happening in my lab right now has nothing to do with cryptography, and everything to do with the future of AI.

I'm a cosmologist at UC San Diego teaching undergraduates to build, program, and eventually launch quantum computers — possibly to the Moon via Artemis!

We cover: why Sabine's code-breaking verdict misses the real story, how free tools like Quantum Rings are closing the education gap Sabine thinks is a hardware problem, why Q-Day just got moved up to 2029, what my students are actually doing with quantum computers in my lab, and why the next generation of quantum physicists won't need a billion-dollar facility to train.

The bottleneck isn't the hardware. It's what we're teaching — and who we're teaching it to.

The whole video seems like a paid infomercial for a startup called Quantum Rings. He even shows a clip of a class teaching:

[7:25] Another thing I think is fun is that we can more intuitively see how I squared equals minus 1.

He argues:

[4:45] What are they actually good for these quantum computers? Sabine said, and I'm paraphrasing, that apart from the codebreaking, nobody has figured out how to turn quantum computing theoretical advantage into a real world. Quantum chemistry, material science, optimization, financial modeling. She says not much there has happened. And again, if you're looking at published breakthroughs, she's not wrong.

And see above, as I said, quantum computers are awesome, unrivaled at simulating how quantum computers work. But Sabine is looking perhaps at the wrong metric. The revolution isn't in the papers. It's in the tooling.

5 years ago, if you wanted to run a quantum circuit, you needed to access IBM's cloud. You'd wait in a huge long queue. You'd get a noisy result on maybe 20 cubits, even if you could figure out how to use it, and you'd spend more time debugging the interface than doing actual physics. Today, I'm going to show you something, a free tool where you can use and learn about quantum computing. It's called Quantum 101. It's by Quantum Rings, a quantum computer circuit simulator that runs on your laptop. Not 20 cubits, hundreds of them. Millions of gate operations, high fidelity on your desktop, on your laptop for free. They replicated Google's quantum supremacy experiment.

So there is no published research that show quantum computers are good for anything, but you can just prove it for yourself on a laptop and a free demo account from a startup?

Oh wow, I thought Keating was more honest than this.

There is a Nobel Prize waiting for the first person to prove quantum supremacy. The idea is comical that you can do it on your laptop but no one has bothered to publish it.

Physicist Angela Collier posts a video on physicists don't know how planes work, largely about some predictions Lord Kelvin made in a 1900 interview. In particular, he said that heavier-than-air-flight would never work. She says we should not have expected him to be wise outside his specialty, and he had no expertise in flight.

Here is another example of an expert predicting outside his expertise:

Live Science spoke with physicist David Gross, who today received the $3 million "Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics". He was part of a trio that won the 2004 physics Nobel prize for research that helped complete the Standard Model of particle physics. But when asked if physics will reach a unified theory of the fundamental forces of nature within 50 years, Gross has a surprising answer. "Currently, I spend part of my time trying to tell people... that the chances of you living 50 [more] years are very small."

Live Science: So what do you suggest as remedies to lower that risk?

Gross: We had something called the Nobel Laureate Assembly for reducing the risk of nuclear war in Chicago last year.

His prize was for quark interactions. We have no reason to believe he is wiser about nuclear war than anyone else.

If he were correct, then I would expect him to favor nuking Iran, in order to stop them from developing a bomb. But I do not hear him saying that.

I am not criticizing these people for having opinions on quantum computing. They are physicists, and probably friends with some of the researchers in the field, even if they are not in the field themselves. I just want to hold them to their predictions. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists warned of nuclear war for years, and then moved its clock close to midnight just when everyone else thought that the chance of war was reducted. The fact is that nukes have kept keep the peace, so far.